Bottom-up fabrication approaches to novel plasmonic materials.

Recent research effort towards developing novel metal nanoparticles (NPs) and their ordered arrays have been motivated by the emergence of plasmonics. In particular, tuning the size, morphology, composition and the separation of metal NPs has allowed us to engineer the collective properties of plasmonic crystals for specific applications. Here we present our recent development of bottom-up growth methods and demonstrate convenience for the preparation of such plasmonic materials. By implementation of physical, chemical, or electrochemical deposition of a metal in combination with micromolding on two-dimensional colloidal crystals, metallic NPs with a variety of morphologies can be created in an ordered lattice. The prepared novel plasmonic crystals could find applications in optics, optoelectronics, materials science, sensing and biophysics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]